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The introduction of Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMT) and the long‐term development of Computer Integrated Manufacture (CIM) present challenges to those engineers and managers who must implement them and those who must manage the total manufacturing system. Basic ideas in management development are reviewed. A systems model is contrasted with one based on the central idea of a “champion of change”. The former addresses the complex inter‐relationships that exist between teams involved in a number of concurrent development projects and the necessary diffusion of learning throughout the organisation, but ignores power relationships and individual attributes of company staff. The latter has considerable strengths as a model for producing action but may present problems in the context of traditional UK companies. The management education of engineers is commented on, emphasising the distinction between the basic skills needed to operate as an engineer in a company and the long‐term development necessary to create the “technological champion”.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how digital and physical product development can be successfully coordinated and which new product development and contextual practices are suitable for the combined digital-physical product development process.

The paper is based on a multiple-case study within one company with three digital-physical product development projects as the units of analysis. The data collection and analysis are guided by an existing research model. The case study is used deductively to illustrate the model.

When combining digital and physical development processes, one or both need to change. This may lead to sub-optimization of one or both of the processes but optimizes the combined digital-physical process. Various development and coordination practices as well as contextual measures must be put into place to improve fit to the digital-physical process characteristics and mixed materiality.

The paper illustrates the research model with case evidence and suggests tentative theory in the form of propositions. Further research needs to explore the impact of the practices and contextual measures proposed.

This research proposes a range of conditions facilitating the successful development of digital-physical products.

This paper is among the first to empirically explore the complex process of digital-physical product development. Taking a process perspective and focusing on organizational and managerial practices and the influence of context, organization theory is used as the theoretical lens.

In new product development (NPD), changes to the initial designs are often proposed for on‐going design projects due to new insights. These engineering changes belong to a wide range from incremental to radical and, in their impact, even to discontinuous change. Consequently, the actual workload of development projects confronted with engineering changes does not match the initial work estimates for the project's work packages. Accordingly, the intended timing of readiness of development projects in an NPD program will drift away. This timing is one of the causes of change propagation to other projects which results in even more engineering changes. For larger changes, the effects on timing may be disastrous. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the cause‐and‐effect relationships triggered by various types of changes and explain the need for a more integrated approach to managing engineering change.

A longitudinal case study was performed at a leading microlithography manufacturing company, in which almost 20,000 engineering changes were included. This study allowed the disclosure of the complexities of engineering change management and provides guidelines for handling the resulting problems arising from managing these various types of change.

In the study, various sources of complexities in managing engineering change were observed, which hinder effective implementation of various types of engineering change. Based on the case observations, a number of improvement possibilities are proposed, such as: alignment of goals and impacts of engineering change on all organizational levels; and planning, monitoring and controlling discontinuous engineering changes as separate projects.

Although further studies are needed to replicate the results, the paper gives a more thorough understanding of factors that could support the implementation of discontinuous innovation in incumbent firms by using the engineering change management process.

ETO supply chains produce high-value products on a project basis. The occurrence of delays is a major problem that impacts the performance of a company and its supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the cause of delays and to understand the role of coordination to mitigate them.

An in-depth case study was conducted to identify problems that delay a project and to examine such problems from a systemic perspective. Based on data from interviews, group meetings, field observations and documentation, a pattern is proposed to explain the relation between coordination and lead time.

Conceptually, to reduce the project lead time a higher level of concurrency is necessary. However, more concurrency increases the interdependencies between activities, something which demands more coordination effort. Since the coordination mechanisms applied are not appropriate to cope with the increasing coordination effort, a number of problems appear causing reworks and delays which increase the lead time.

The main limitation is that the authors are not able to distinguish which particular project characteristic influences the adoption of a specific coordination mechanism. Further research is required to examine the effect of various coordination mechanisms across a higher number of projects.

Practitioners can benefit from discussions in this study to comprehend how coordination can improve the delivery performance in ETO supply chains.

This study contributes to a better understanding of coordination in ETO supply chains by making sense of problems that delay the project. Matching the coordination mechanisms with the required coordination effort, which is based on the project characteristics, is a way to avoid delays and reduce the lead time.

Examines design for manufacturability (DFM) which has become of a paramount interest to academicians and practitioners as well. The emergence of advanced manufacturing and information technologies and recent managerial philosophies such as JIT, TQM have made it easier for manufacturing enterprises to carry out many of their activities concurrently. This new approach to business would no doubt result in increased efficiency, as measured by cost savings, and increased effectiveness as measured by improvements in quality, flexibility, and responsiveness. This new approach to manufacturing emphasizes that simultaneous improvement in these competitive priorities rather than trade‐offs will be the norm in many manufacturing establishments. Design for manufacturability, as a time‐based strategy, has been used by the Japanese for many years, and there is no reason to think that it will not work for Western manufacturers. However, if not planned for carefully, it can hurt rather than help manufacturing companies. In the cases that have been reported in literature so far, successes outnumber failures. Sheds light on the theoretical foundation of DFM as a time‐based technology. Examines the different approaches to product and processes design and compares and contrasts the traditional and concurrent approaches to manufacturing. Examines a number of DFM definitions in an attempt to offer a more representative definition. Analyses the main pillars of DFM and explains the necessary characteristics for successful implementation of DFM. Elaborates the benefits of DFM as reported in literature. Explains some of the drawbacks of DFM and introduces the reader to Part 2 of this article.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the collaborative aspects of the communication practice and illustrate the importance of role‐related liaison devices for coordination in a project setting.

A case study was made of a large Swedish partnering project focusing on the coordinative and communicative activities carried out within the project. It consists of 18 semi‐structured interviews, three days of observations, meeting participations, document analysis, and was analysed with a theoretically supported thematic categorisation.

The paper describes the communicative sub‐processes of the project and analyses the link between them. The focus is placed on illustrating the importance of the project liaison as a crucial part of the coordination of the project. It is shown how the project liaisons; guides and coordinates the ongoing activities, translates and reduces information, creates space for the experience of the subcontractors, assists in coordinating unexpected situations, and therefore constitutes a crucial part of the success of the project.

From a project management perspective it is suggested that it is beneficial to identify, acknowledge, and create legitimacy for project liaisons in order to facilitate the coordination of the project. As the project liaison is shown to be of major importance it is also suggested that there is a need to further study the existence and role of liaisons within project organisations.

The paper draws on organisational theory and therefore enriches the field of project coordination as it also includes and stresses the importance of the human actors.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and describe a method that uses recurrent problems to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the diagnosis of new product development (NPD) processes and supports the identification of improvement opportunities. The proposed method, called Diagile, is based on recurrent current reality trees (CRTs) and is a new way of building CRTs that includes best project management practices, and the identification and prioritization of improvement opportunities. To support the execution of the method, recurrent problems were identified and a computational tool to aid the diagnosis, a database of improvement opportunities and an automated spreadsheet to prioritize improvement projects were developed.

The proposed method was evaluated through a controlled experiment at a multinational manufacturer of office supplies.

The results achieved confirm that the use of the Diagile method increases the diagnostic efficiency and effectiveness when compared to diagnoses performed by the traditional CRT method.

The validity of the method must be tested on a larger scale, since this work involved only one controlled experiment for this purpose. The experiment involved the participation of postgraduate research assistants, who cannot be considered specialists in the diagnosis of NPD. One could question whether the method will be as helpful for proficient users as well. The authors did not have proficient users available to run the experiment. However, the authors believe that such a specialist would save time in carrying out a diagnosis with Diagile, and also be more effective in validating the diagnosis. However, this assumption could not be tested here and can therefore be considered a limiting factor of the experiment. Nevertheless, the positive results of the evaluations of the companies and users of the two case studies corroborate the statement that the objective of this work was attained.

The greater efficiency and effectiveness provided by the proposed Diagile method was also evident in the identification and prioritization of improvement opportunities. The experimental group drew up a more relevant and coherent list of improvement projects than the control group, and provided documentation for these projects in the form of project charts. The authors believe these results can be of a great impact if implemented by practitioners.

This paper proposes a new way to perform diagnostic of NPD process. In particular, this process is well known to be highly strategic, nevertheless, normally excluded out of improvement initiatives because of its complexity. The diagnostic method proposed is a powerful tool to assist practitioners finding systemic improvement opportunities, expanding the assessment to all dimensions of a business process, e.g. people, technology and process activities.

The aim of this paper is to highlight the application of six sigma, software engineering techniques and simulation to software development with a view to improving the software process and product.

This paper attempts to integrate six sigma and simulation to define, analyse, measure and predict various elements of software development (such as cost, schedule, defects) that influence software quality, thereby helping the software personnel take necessary measures early in the development process to improve the software processes and remove defects. Simulation results provide qualitative and quantitative suggestions on the ways to change the software process to achieve six sigma quality. The integration of six sigma and CMM and the role of knowledge management in software organisations have been taken into account.

Most software organisations operate between 2.3 and 3 sigma level. This paper presents a framework for definition, measurement, and analysis of important elements of the software product and process using six sigma tools and exploits the use of simulation in bringing six sigma improvements. Case studies have been presented to demonstrate the findings.

Application of the techniques presented in this paper would definitely improve software organisations' processes and product.

The adoption of methodologies outlined in this paper in software companies would enable them to attain improvements in terms of cost, schedule and quality.

The integration of simulation with six sigma applied to software development is novel in this paper. This paper will be valuable for quality professionals and management personnel in software organisations.

International management strategy.

Graduate and upper undergraduate classes.

This case deals with an information technology (IT) outsourcing company based in Egypt which has ventured into the international market right from the start without establishing itself first in the local market. Its record of success was due largely to a group of young Egyptian entrepreneurs with an international orientation. Their strongly held values were translated into an organizational culture that was manifested in the company's relationships with its clients, whether multinational companies or regional governments. This mutual trust has generated work through referrals and has saved the company the need, at least initially, to adopt a proactive marketing strategy. In addition to culture the company's structure has shown considerable agility in dealing with the unexpected demands from clients through developing strong functional departments supported by numerous cross-functional teams. The case also presents the development of the human resource function which is considered the backbone of IT outsourcing companies.

Students are expected to learn the following: internationalization of business start ups in developing nations can take place even in the face of limitations of the local markets; the importance of leadership and culture in fostering trusting relationships with clients; the need to constantly reconfigure resources to meet challenges of competition and the needs of clients; the viability of a defensive strategy for newly established companies if supplemented by trusting relationships with clients; and the role of an evolving structure to fit the growth stages of the company.

Teaching note.

This paper aims to present a model that maps the relationship between factors and process stages of the knowledge transfer (KT) between new product development (NPD) teams.

The model was constructed through a quantitative evaluation with scholars and practitioners of the NPD field. To evaluate the model and its usefulness, a practical application was carried out in two large Brazilian companies.

A relationship model between 16 main influence factors and 11 stages of the KT process was obtained. It could be seen through the practical applications that the model helps companies to identify and prioritize improvement opportunities in the KT between NPD teams.

Prior studies had been concerned with the analysis of KT factors, but considering KT as an isolated act. So, this work has advanced in the deployment of the KT stages and the relationship of those with different influence factors.

This paper brings an important practical contribution, once several academic works have been concerned with to demonstrate relationships among factors, but few have shown how these results could help to solve practical issues observed in companies.

Results presented in this paper enable the extension of comprehension about the KT phenomena in the NPD process. Furthermore, this paper shows how the proposed model can be used as a decision tool to guide a diagnosis and detect improvement opportunities in KT between NPD teams.